Flushed Away
Flushed Away is a 2006 British/American computer animated action/adventure comedy film directed by David Bowers and Sam Fell. It was made in the partnership between Aardman Animations and DreamWorks Animation, and is Aardman's first completely computer-animated feature as opposed to the usual stop-motion. Plot Roddy is a decidedly upper-crust "society mouse" who lives the life of a beloved pet in a posh Kensington flat. When a sewer rat named Sid comes spewing out of the sink and decides he's hit the jackpot, Roddy schemes to rid himself of the pest by luring him into the "whirlpool." Sid may be an ignorant slob, but he's no fool, so it is Roddy who winds up being flushed away into the bustling sewer world of Ratropolis. There Roddy meets Rita, an enterprising scavenger who works the sewers in her faithful boat, the Jammy Dodger. Roddy immediately wants out, or rather, up; Rita wants to be paid for her trouble; and, speaking of trouble, the villainous Toad - who royally despises all rodents equally, making no distinction between mice and rats--wants them iced... literally. The Toad dispatches his two hapless hench-rats, Spike and Whitey, to get the job done. When they fail, the Toad has no choice but to send to France for his cousin - that dreaded mercenary, Le Frog. Trivia In the first theatrical trailer, Roddy was not the only pet of the little human girl. There was also a cage with two small yellow gerbils, who seemed to be Roddy's menservants. However, in the final cut of the film, these two characters were removed, probably to advance the story, and make Roddy appear to be a character who is more "alone" than "spoiled". The first trailer also shows the discovery of Sid during the day instead of late at night. Aardman's first fully-CGI feature film. The reason for using computer animation instead of the studio's trademark clay animation was the large amount of scenes involving water, which is nearly impossible to do convincingly in stop motion. Hugh Jackman also provided the screams for the slug that Roddy first meets in the sewer. For security reasons, early prints of the film were shipped under the title "Leech". When Roddy is selecting a movie for the movie premiere, the DVDs with real titles are all Dreamworks films. The animators nicknamed one of the Kung Fu Frogs' attack moves "the Reindeer of Death". At the beginning of the film, when Roddy is going through his wardrobe, the outfit he chooses is an Elvis Presley-style rhinestone jumpsuit. According to Peter Lord, co-founder of Aardman, this film's original concept involved pirates, and was pitched to Dreamworks soon after the release of Chicken Run. However, Aardman were told that there was no market for pirate films (this was before Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl was made), and were told to modernize the concept. By the time the writer had done this, the project was temporarily shelved to make way for the production of Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. The film uses software that was developed for the rabbits floating around the Bun-Vac 6000 in Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. The software reproduces the 'imperfections' found in clay-mation (i.e. dropped frames, thumb-prints, etc.). Andy Serkis beat Robert De Niro and William Shatner to play the part of Spike. Jean Reno beat Stellan Skarsgård, Kevin Kline, and Johnny Depp to play the part of "Le Frog". The Toad wears a Freemasons ring on his pinkie finger. The books on Toad's shelf are "Warts and Peace" by Leo Toadstool, "Unfinished Verse" by Long Tung, "A Brief History of Slime," and his scrapbooks, "The Tragic History of the Great Great Toad, Vol. I," followed by Volumes II through VI. In Tabitha's bedroom, as Roddy, Rita, and Sid are talking, there is a book behind them labeled "Animation". The frog dressed as a mime is named Marcel. This is a reference/homage to famed French mime artist Marcel Marceau. The frog in question is dressed as Marceau's famed character named Bip. Nicole Kidman was considered for the role of Rita. Several of the names found in the DVDs and on Rita's father's cast belong to the children of producers, directors, and other people involved in the movie. When Roddy and Rita are about to be 'iced' in the fridge, you can see that the controls panel the Toad is using is an early Atari 2600 game console (all the controls on the front). The game plugged into the unit is called "Froggie", a play on the old game "Frogger." When facing the Toad, the label on the back of the unit warns of "no service usable parts inside", and "opening the unit voids the warranty". When the stove falls through the floor of Rita's house, a cockroach that was sitting behind it can be seen holding a book. The book is Franz Kafka's novella 'Metamorphosis', the protagonist of which turns into a (non specified) insect, which is often translated as a cockroach. The cockroach appears to be reading a French translation: the title "La métamorphose" is clearly seen, while the Ka- in Kafka is obscured by the insect's 'hand'. Box office Flushed Away collected $64,488,856 in the United States, which was below the average of other CGI films from DreamWorks Animation, but $111,814,663 from international markets for a worldwide total of $176,319,242. Henry's copy Henry has the 2007 DVD of this movie from DreamWorks Animation SKG Home Entertainment. It has previews of Over the Hedge and Charlotte's Web. The special features on it are 21 games and challenges, animated slug songs, and how to make a slug.